This image is part of a set designed to document ecosystem changes in the grasslands and forests that Conservacion Patagonica has acquired to connect areas of uplands and create the future Patagonia National Park. See: www.conservacionpatagonica.org.
For the past eighty years, the Chacabuco Valley in Chile’s Aysen Region was a large sheep ranch, where overgrazing had severely damaged the grasslands. With the launch of the Patagonia National Park project, Conservacion Patagonica removed the sheep from the land; wildlife — most obviously guanacos — began to return to the area. Kris Tompkins, founder and president of Conservacion Patagonica, asked me to be one of the project’s scientific advisors. My immediate preoccupation was to document the ecological changes that would likely take place in the area as ranch became national park, as guanacos replaced sheep, as setting fires to clear forest stopped. Moreover, global climate disruption is projected to make quite marked changes on this area: temperature and probably rainfall will shift, and glaciers will melt. I looked for a technical strategy for documenting these changes to develop a deeper understanding of land use changes throughout Patagonia, where overgrazing affects huge expanses of grasslands.
When I began this project in early 2011, the coverage of high-resolution satellite images was quite poor. This will surely improve, allowing for time series of birds-eye images to record the changes. But the need to have additional detailed and eye-level images is obvious. In the years and decades to come, these gigapans will form a baseline to allow the Park’s managers and visitors to understand the changes taking place.
I was inspired by J.R. Hastings and R. M. Turner’s “The Changing Mile.” Over a century of photographs creates a visual account of land use changes that provides a rich source of understanding of ecological change and its drivers. I hope these photographs will do the same, in time.
An account of this restoration — and an interview with Kris Tompkins — is at http://newswatch.nationalgeographic.com/2010/01/23/patagonia_grasslands_park/